What Is AlphaBeasts?

AlphaBeasts is the follow-up collaborative project to the now-completed Animal Alphabet. This time, instead of drawing real animals, we’re drawing fictional ones each week–one for each letter of the alphabet. On the first day (Monday, October 17th) everyone will draw beasts beginning with the letter “A.” The following Monday, everyone will draw beasts that begin with “B.” Rinse and repeat…

Who Can Participate?

Anyone who wants to! No one cares whether you “can’t draw” or you’re Gustave Doré. It’s just for fun!

What Am I Supposed To Draw?

Put simply: fictional beasts. It (1) should be an animal and not a person and (2) should be imaginary or fictional, but not made up by the person doing the drawing.

The fine print:

No creatures that actually exist or have actually existed in the past. So, no dinosaurs or giant sloths.

Generic creature names are legit, but NOT proper names. “D is for Dragon” works, but not “S is for Smaug” (the dragon from The Hobbit). Yeah, there are some gray areas, but generally if you can put the word “the” before it–as in “the Lorax” then it’s probably a name for a type and not for an individual.

Fictional does not equal “creature.” Hedwig the owl from Harry Potter is not legit. Owls are real animals.

The creature must be from something–a book, movie, myth, legend, whatever–but you can’t just make up an original creature yourself.

How Do I Submit My Beast?

Twitter: We will be begin with beasts starting with the letter “A” on Monday the 17th of October. Post your completed drawing somewhere–an image hosting site, your blog, whatever–and post a link to it to Twitter sometime during the day each Monday with the #alphabeasts hashtag. Include the name of your beast–like “M is for Manticore.”

Google+: Same deal, but instead of the hashtag, share the post with Andrew Neal (in addition to whomever else you want). Andrew has generously volunteered to post each week’s AlphaBeasts to a tumblr but he needs to know you’ve posted one in order to grab it.

Do I Have To Draw Something For Every Single Letter?

No, you don’t. You can draw just one letter/week’s beast or you can do all twenty-six.

I Don’t Draw. What If I Just Want To View Each Week’s Beasts?

Awesome! There’re two easy ways to do that. First, you can follow the AlphaBeasts tumblr and each beast will appear in your stream as its posted: http://alphabeasts.tumblr.com. Alternately, you can watch the beasts appear throughout the day each Monday by watching the #alphabeasts hashtag on Twitter.

What If I Have A Question?

You can email me at the address up in the header of this blog, or DM me on twitter: @ben_towle.

@Matthew – I guess you could start a parallel group on some other site, but I think a big part of what makes the project fun is to see the results all collected on a single tumblr at the end of each week (here’s the last one: http://animalalphabet.tumblr.com/ ). It takes a fair amount of work to grab each letter’s crop of images and re-post them all to the tumblr each week, even just grabbing stuff from the Twitter feed (which is where about 99% of the people involved post) and the more places one has to go to grab them all, the more work it is. That said, if you get something going on in parallel, you should certainly contact Andrew Neal who’s in charge of tumblr posting this go ’round and see if he’s willing to begin culling images from there as well; it would just depend on the amount of extra work involved, I’d guess. You can find his email here: http://wanderlane.com/ .

Really looking forward to taking part in this. Thanks for the work so far. I just wanted to point out that you can also use searchable hash tags in G+ now. Not sure if that’s useful, but it couldn’t hurt to know it’s available.

@Thom – Glad you’re onboard! This is going to be fun for sure. Thanks for the heads-up on the hashtags. Just so as not to confuse folks late in the game, I think I’ll leave the directions up as-is for the moment, but when/if we do a third alphabet project that’ll definitely come in handy.

If we get the same amount of turnout we did for animal alphabet, it probably won’t be a big issue for me to cull images from multiple venues. If we get a big, big turnout, it could turn out to be an issue. I’m certainly willing to give it a shot, though.